Gender Equity Guidelines for Department of Medicine Search Committees

Goal

to achieve 50% female faculty in DoM leadership positions in seven years

Rationale

A diverse faculty benefits the department, the University, our learners, and our patients

Individuals have unconscious bias

An unconscious bias is an implicit attitude, stereotype, motivation or assumption that can occur without one’s knowledge, control or intention. Unconscious bias affects all types of people and can be found in men and women. Examples of unconscious bias include gender bias, racial bias, and ageism.

Unconscious biases are important to consider in instances when judgements are made about quality and competence, judgements that are routinely made by search committees.

Unconscious gender bias is the differential treatment of men and women, the impact of which may be positive, negative or neutral.

The work, ideas and findings from women or minorities may be undervalued or they may be unfairly attributed to a research director or collaborators despite contrary evidence in publications or letters of evidence. [1-5]

Assumptions about possible family responsibilities and their effect on the candidate’s career may negatively influence evaluation of a candidate’s merit, despite evidence of productivity. [6]

Evaluators who were distracted by other tasks and under time pressure gave women lower ratings than men for the same written evaluation of job performance indicating that evaluators are more likely to rely on underlying assumptions and biases when they do not give sufficient time and attention to their evaluations. [7]

Institutions reproduce themselves

The ways in which institutions are organized and governed transmit their institutional norms from generation to generation, and individuals within those institutions are socialized to expect things to be a certain way. [8]

This phenomenon maintains the power and advantages of groups that have traditionally held those advantages and makes it harder for those from groups that have traditionally been less powerful to be successful and become leaders. [9]

The identification of this phenomenon of cultural reproduction, including pointing out assumptions that advantage or disadvantage certain groups, helps to disrupt the cycle, thereby enabling positive change. [10]

Equity efforts will benefit recruitment and retention

Approach to mitigating gender bias in search committees

Establish Search Committee

Ensure at least 1/3 of members are women, reflecting the current DoM pool but acknowledging this proportion should increase as the recruitment of women to the DoM increases. This target will be assessed every two years by the DoM

Ensure that the committee membership remain the same throughout a single recruitment process

Raise awareness of committee members to potential for unconscious bias

In a linguistic analysis of letters of reference for faculty hired at a major medical school in the US, differences were noted between letters written for men and women. Letters written for female applicants were shorter and less focused on the candidate’s record of accomplishment. They used more gendered terms such as ‘intelligent young lady’.

Letters for women included more grindstone adjectives such as: hardworking, conscientious, dependable, careful, dedicated or meticulous.

Letters for men included more standout adjectives such as excellent, superb, outstanding or unique.

This finding suggests that women’s success is more often associated with effort while men’s success is associated with ability.

Letters written for female applicants included more references to personal life than those written for men.

Letters written for men were more likely to have references to their CV, publications or patents.